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Back to he OP, I suspect that the wind and the rain may have a lot to do with it as well!
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@Humph -- hybrids do make a VERY tax-efficient option for company car users, as their low emissions mean very low benefit-in-kind tax.
I did look at both the Prius and the Honda hybrid (the imported Japanese market saloon-bodied thing) as a company car when my Passat diesel was due for a change.
The low tax was a huge plus-point: if I remember right, I would've paid over £1000 less tax per year compared with the Passat, and presumably with similar economy. And in London (possibly Manchester soon), the ability to commute into town without paying congestion charges would be a factor.
What decided me against both was the packaging -- both were a bit too small for the "family barge" duties that my car is subjected to. Also the fact that both are autos: I simply prefer a manual gearbox.
I'll look again when my current Mondeo is up for replacement in 2.5 years ... who knows what'll be around then?
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Lud - you've hit the nail with mentioning that the Prius is fashionable. 'Interesting' perhaps somewhat more debatable. After all, it could have a multitude of alternative power options but it won't go without petrol, therefore it runs on petrol, and hence it's economy is an issue. If emissions are bought into the equation, and I admit some ignorance here, then what goes into the thing at point of manufacture (specifically within the batteries) must be considered if we are able to assess it's 'green' credentials. I'd dearly love to know whether I do more harm, through a cars whole life cycle, with a Prius or with a decent Diesel. I understand for company car users the tax issue, but this doesn't affect me, and indeed it adds nothing to the green debate about this car.
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I don't think the batteries are the environmental disaster that some have suggested. Neither does the input of energy exceed the input for other vehicles. Some however cling to the echoes of the "CNW Marketing Research" effort to sanitise Hummers/Jeeps. This was an attempt to make the thigs reputable by distorting the amount of energy used in manufacture compared with the lifetime usage of fuel etc. with a side issue of hammering Prius. The SMMT figures for energy consumption are 15:85 where 15 is the manufacturing element. Rebuttal of CNW material here: tinyurl.com/2flebb
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The reason the Prius gets in to the congestion zone for free and similarly economical diesels don't is because when it sitting in traffic or driving at low speed, the engine isn't emittng any nasties.
My dad has one, not that he's bothered about the environment, and gets a regular 58mpg, and this from a car that is a fair bit larger than Focus sized cars. And it runs on cheaper petrol too.
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One thing that you hear Prius owners say is that they are a very relaxing, stress-free drive. Also, I have seen a few longboard surfies turn up at the beach with their board inside a Prius - not sure about the safety of that though.
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@OP. I understand the battery is less efficient at lower temperatures, so you may be running more often on the petrol engine than during the warmer times of year, or the petrol engine may be having to supply more energy to charge up the battery. Having said that, is there such a variation in temperature in the UK these days between summer and winter?;-)
@Prius critics. You won't save the planet driving one of these. However, just think how much nicer, quieter and pollution free our cities would be if all vehicles were fitted with engines that not only switch themselves off at traffic lights but also with electric motors for silent propulsion at low speeds using energy reclaimed during braking.
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How far can a Prius run on battery?
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The reason the Prius gets in to the congestion zone for free and similarly economical diesels don't is because when it sitting in traffic or driving at low speed the engine isn't emittng any nasties.
Not true.
Depends on how well charged the battery is. And of course when you fill up with unleaded you are exposing yourself to benzene fumes - a KNOWN carcinogen. Diesels and petrols both emit particles - the petorl emitted ones are smaller and, potentially, more harmful.
I've never understood why hybrids are exempt from Con Charge, when diesels that emit less CO2 are chaged. Boris should have sorted this anomally out when he scrapped the proposed £25 charge for 'guzzlers'.
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hybrids are exempt from Con Charge when diesels that emit lessCO2 are chaged. Boris should have sorted this anomally out when he scrapped the proposed £25 charge for 'guzzlers'.
Politically impossible. City tree-huggers have never realised that electricity has to come from somewhere, Battersea is better known as an arts centre than as a power station!
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How does the heater work in a Prius on freezing cold mornings without running the engine?
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>>It was created to fill a gap in the US where petrol is the only viable fuel for car drivers.<<
I'm afraid that is not true.
The Prius was conceived in the early 1990's when Toyota was booming. The chairman and the board considered this to be a dangerous time for Toyota as it was becoming too successful. According to the chairman this is what leads companies into complacency. The biggest problem for the way Toyota think is when associates (they din't have employees !) do not believe there is a crisis and a need to improve the product or process. As such the chairman asked the board "can we continue to building cars the way we have been doing all this time" ? Can the company survive the 21st century with the type of R&D we have been using. One of the management rules in Toyota is " Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy even at the expense of short term profit". As such Toyota challenged itself to think differently about cars and how they were developed. They launched a project called Global 21 and this is the car that became Prius. The board never set out to develop a hybrid at all for the USA. It set a challenge to it's management team to:-
1. Develop a new method for manufacturing cars for the 21st Century and
2. Develop a new method of developing cars for the 21st century.
The only other challenge it set itself was to build a car that was 50% more fuel efficient that the Corolla at the time. The Corolla was doing 30.8mpg and they had to deliver a car capable of 47.5. This was not because it's cars weren't selling though or there was a fuel crisis.
So whilst allot of people don't agree or like the Prius, you have to understand why Toyota did it in the first place. And as I say the board never challenged anyone to build a hybrid.
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I'm afraid that is not true. The Prius was conceived in the early 1990's when Toyota was booming. The chairman and the board considered this to be a dangerous time for Toyota as it was becoming too successful...
No, what you are quoting is Toyota hype freely published along with other myths and legends in many reference books such as "The Toyota Product Development System".
The Prius was originally conceived as a response to the ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) laws which Califonia anounced for large urban areas in 1990 and planned to be mandatory by 1997. Everyone and his dog started to work on electric cars of one form or another in order to comply with this planned regulation. The hybrid idea came about as a way of meeting the ZEV requirement in cities whilst still being able to offer decent driving range without having to plug the car into an electrical socket, which was the problem with the Saturn EV1 electric car launched by GM.
California eventually ditched the ZEV idea and all manufacturers with the exception of Toyota and Honda shelved their hybrid projects. Up that time, VW and Peugeot (who still sold in the US), to name but two, were working on combined petrol/ electric drivetrains. I happen to know this because I was working for one of the suppliers at the time.
Only Toyota and Honda brought their development projects through to marketable products with the Prius and the Insight.
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Sorry Bagpuss but it is you that has it all wrong.
Firstly why would some well respected academics of this world publish material such as this when it is not true.
Secondly if the Toyota Product Development System (and that is not the literature that was being quoted) is just hype, why is every other car manufacturer in the world copying it, along with the Production System.
Unfortunately you are showing a level of ignorance as to how Toyota do business - which surprises me if you worked in the business, and challenging well respected academics with nothing more than to say it is hype.
The prius was always designed with a petrol engine and so would this be zero emissions.
I'm sure many UK companies would enjoy such huge profits when they are based on myths.
But please if you are so sure of your facts, respond with all the other myths that you think are out there from Toyota.
I look forward to being educated.
What is worrying is that you seem to epitomise the business culture (by under-estimating the competition) in the UK and this will lead to our downfall.
Edited by Pendlebury on 24/11/2008 at 19:44
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@Pendlebury
Sorry if my mail came across as curt or arogant, this was not my intention.
Toyota is a hugely successful company with a way of designing, developing and manufacturing products which is a benchmark in the industry. I have huge respect for the company and its management with whom I still have contact. I have worked for a Toyota supplier and certainly do not underestimate them, though I agree that a lot of companies do, but frequently for the wrong reasons.
What I cannot abide is academics who overglorify things they write about, in this case Toyota. Whether they are well respected or not is a matter of opinion. It's unlikely they have worked for Toyota otherwise the various Confidentiality Agreements you are expected to sign would probably prevent them publishing anything of value.
There are many things to learn from Toyota but when trying to understand why their approach works so successfully for them, I believe it is dangerous for businesses to concentrate on myths rather than understanding the engineering competence, quality culture, rigour and attention to detail that Toyota have adopted as a business strategy over the last 50 years. My experience with companies trying to copy Toyota is that they pull a couple of headline grabbing details out of the hat, try and adopt them and then expect miracles to happen after 6 months or so. This rarely achieves anything but I guess it's easy money for management consultants.
To your point about the zero emissions. The original ZEV proposal from California defined (if memory serves correctly) 2 types of vehicle - Zero Emissions (no internal combusion engine) and Ultra Low Emissions (petrol/ electric).
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Thanks Bagpuss for your post - I think I must have mis-understood you and read a little too much into your reply and assumed a certain tone that was never there (my fault).
I have to agree with you above though and you make the point well.
I think allot of academics have tried to cash in on a very successful company and I have also seen so many examples of how companies have taken certain practices and tried to implement them without understanding how to do it properly.
In fact I have talked to Toyota's competitors who have visited their factories and even they say that Toyota don't mind showing anybody round because they know not many will really understand how they do things.
Everyone talks about the Toyota Production System and I have visited many companies that will show me a book or intranet system with their equivalents, but as you know when you ask Toyota to show them their Production System, they will tell you that none of it is written down - it is just how they do things, which supports your view of academics cashing in.
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City tree-huggers have never realised that electricity has to come from somewhere Battersea
Nonsense. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and others have been campaigning for years on issues of electricity generation, opposing both nuclear and coal stations. You may not agree with either of those points, but they are very well-understood in environmental circles.
Your mistake is to assume that the Prius is bought by tree-huggers rather than by well-heeled middle-class folks who want to appear green without actually changing their lifestyles.
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I always thought diesel fumes and particles were more carcinogenic?
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Numerous scientists, docs and medical researchers, both in the US and UK, now consider diesel a serious health risk.
Every garage in the UK has plastic bags there for your 'convenience' when filling up with diesel so that you don't get diesel on your hands. No doubt a great get out of jail card for the petrol companies when people start bringing lawsuits against them - "Well, we did provide the gloves!".
Look at our pavements - many of them are filthy black with a diesel like tar on them that is impossible to get off. That is what is going inside your lungs when you breathe in and out.
Lung dieseases such as Asthma have soared in the UK in the past decades - one in TEN people in the UK now has asthma and it can strike you down at any age. Trust me, you don't want it and if you knew about the links between diesel and asthma you would never drive a diesel car again.
Rant over.
One last word... Diesel is killing us and future generations will wonder what on earth we were using it for? Oh, for a few extra MPG!
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The fact that the Prius and the Civic actually work,and work well is a major achievment.Can you imagine the problems of a GM/Fiat/PSA etc hybrid?
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Thanks Tawse, you've given me the biggest laugh of the day! You can now take your tongue out of your cheek....
Unless you were actually being serious... in which case you need to do your investigation a little better, m8!
The truth is that petrol and diesel are as bad as each other and hybrids/electric cars aren't any better when they use coal/oil/gas fired power stations to charge themselves up...
(PS I've been running diesel cars for 15 years and my asthma is no worse now than it was 16 years ago... despite walking through Brum every day and breathing in all those diesel fumes... so perhaps I'll use that to prove that diesel is the cleanest fuel in existance!)
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For Oilrag, Prius batteries are quite small as they are for boost only. Although there is an engine lock-out for plain electric running, I find about 2 miles max unless I turn the engine loose again. I use the EV lock just for potttering around the village, and leave everything to the computer when in a trafic jam. It will start the engine on "charge" when the battery indicator hits red.
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For what its worth, I rented a Prius in the States earlier this year. Over 6 days we covered 985 miles, returning about 45mpg. It was some of the most stress free motoring I have ever enjoyed...a mix of Freeway and twisty mountain roads in the northern Sierra Nevada.
The only downside was that I found the 'Display' strangely addictive..watching the wheels go round and where power was being supplied from. The seats were very comfortable, the aircon fantastic in temps hovering around 100degrees some days in the Sacramento valley, and the stereo excellent.
A huge success in the States due to their lack of small efficient petrol cars (and complete lack of small diesels).
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Thanks Gary! Interesting.
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If one person in 10 in UK has asthma (figures come from where?) and five cars in 10 plus all the lorries and buses run on diesel I am not sure that we have a proven connection,between diesel alone, and asthma. Prius mpg was brought home to me by the Top Gear item where a Prius did 10 laps of the test track, at a speed that suited the driver, and was followed b a 3.5 lirte BMW M3 which did not overtake and did a much better mpg! We weren't told what the relative enissions were but on mpg the Prius was not very marvellous!
Causes of Asthma include:-
smoking during pregnancy increases the chance of a child developing asthma
second-hand smoke increases the chance of developing asthma
irritants in the workplace may lead to a person developing asthma
environmental pollution can make asthma symptoms worse
indoor environment - centrally heated and poorly ventilated homes have led to an increased exposure to house-dust mites and mould spores, both asthma triggers
poor diet and an increase in obesity have been linked to asthma
So - not just diesel!
more hygienic environment has been suggested as a cause of asthma (hygiene hypothesis). International rates of asthma suggest that it is a disease of the developed world. UK has one of the highest incidences of asthma along with other developed countries such as NZ, Australia and Ireland
Edited by Armitage Shanks {p} on 24/11/2008 at 12:02
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Please note also that environmental pollution is claimed to make it worse but not to cause it in the first place!
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Professor Stephen Holgate, one ofthe World's top Lung & chest experts, is perhaps the person to talk to about asthma and diesel.
You can find numerous articles linking to what he thinks, plus other scientists both in this country and in the US, via a simple Google. However, here is a simple article from a few years back in one of our broadsheets.
tinyurl.com/6jdc45
Here is an excerpt:
< Diesel, which is being heavily promoted by ministers as a "green" fuel that can help combat global warming, is most to blame.
"These microscopic particles are a major threat to human health," said Professor Stephen Holgate, one of the Government's most senior advisers on air pollution, who is opening a major conference on asthma backed by The Independent on Sunday on 28 April (see below).
"There is a strong suspicion that particulates in air pollution are playing a much greater role in the causation of asthma than has previously been realised," said Professor Holgate, who chairs the official Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards.
"The latest scientific evidence suggests that particulates are now the most important type of air pollutant that threatens human health.">>
< >
The sad reality is that, like smokers who are in denial about smoking being the cause of lung cancer and other illnesses, there are always going to be diesel owners who will deny all the evidence on diesel being a health danger either out of ignorance... or stupdity... or just plain old selflishness... or all 3.
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Particulates occur in all combustion engines. By far the most likely to be dangerous are the ultra fines, which are invisible but emitted by petrol and diesle alike. The diesel emissions are being modified, but not petrol. For a view on some efforts to identify asthmatic reactions: tinyurl.com/6y5b6u
Note the study did not full account of the possible sources! BTW, I don't drive a diesel sohave no axe to grind personally. When Honda bring the iDtec engine out, I might well switch back. Couldn't live with the continued spewing of UF particles from the petrol engine:)
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To be honest tawse, you are wasting your time pushing the diesel emissions theory on here. I have been trying it for months and they will not believe it.
Statements like they are both as bad as each other continue to crop up even though it is not true.
You have to remember that the new EU V legislation being introduced for diesel engines is only a wheeze by the EU. They already know that diesel engines are no worse than petrol.
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@Humph -- hybrids do make a VERY tax-efficient option for company car users as their low emissions mean very low benefit-in-kind tax. I did look at both the Prius and the Honda hybrid (the imported Japanese market saloon-bodied thing) as a company car when my Passat diesel was due for a change. The low tax was a huge plus-point: if I remember right I would've paid over £1000 less tax per year compared with the Passat and presumably with similar economy. And in London (possibly Manchester soon) the ability to commute into town without paying congestion charges would be a factor.
Assuming my fleet manager's spreadsheet is right the Prius is a cheap - ish company car in BIK terms, but not that stunning. For a 40% taxpayer BIK value of a Prius 1.5 VVTi T4 is around 80 quid per month, much the same as a MINI 1.6 Cooper S, BMW 116i ES or an Astra 1.6 VVTI easytronic. The low tax percentage is to some degree offset by the higher list price of the car.
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I'm not a big fan of the Prius, mainly due to the initial cost of the vehicle. But, what many people don't realise though is that the prius is, in effect, an automatic without the inconvenience of a gearstick. So when comparing fuel consumption, compare it with the equivalent auto diesel etc. and you'll see it fares far better in most cases.
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Setting aside the question of whether it is environmentally preferable to a small diesel or not, the Prius is still for a car of its size and weight pretty clean.
It wouldn't make much sense to run one in town if you couldn't plug it in overnight to recharge the battery, although you can just treat it like an ordinary car. But with plenty of juice it has to be pleasant around town. The torque characteristics of electric motors - maximum torque from zero rpm - mean that it is quite brisk off the mark while remaining virtually silent (from the outside), although it is fairly heavy and has two fairly low-output motors.
You may not like the way it looks or the driving style needed to get the best out of it, but that anyone can fail to find such an ingenious device interesting in itself amazes me. Mind you I prefer the look of that Honda coupe thing, whose performance was noticeably better than the Prius's, but the Prius is more practical.
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Tawse, the microscopic particles are produced by petrol engines in larger quantities than diesel, and as someone else pointed out DPFs are weeding out the diesel particulates (in cars, anyhow).. but not in petrol cars... the very small particulates in petrol engines are believed to be more dangerous than the larger ones in diesel engines as they are more easily inhaled... there is also plenty of research which proves the opposite to your quotes, also by "experts"... so my comment about both being as bad as the other is perfectly valid at the moment...
Rather than fighting over which is the cleanest of two "dirty" fuels perhaps we should be pushing manufacturers to produce a clean engine?!!
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